The NICM and the missing $5 million. Where did it go?

Now you see it and now you don’t. Where is the $5 million donation that the National Institute of Complementary Medicine (NICM) received from the controversial supplement company Blackmores? And for that matter, where are the two separate $300 000 donations received from the very same company? A number of weeks ago it was listed on Western Sydney University’s (WSU) researcher portal, under Prof Alan Bensoussan’s projects, but now it has been deleted. Maybe because we have written an article about this controversial issue a while ago? It puts us in a spot of bother because the said article had to be updated to clarify that this information has now been deleted from WSU’s website.

The only remaining donation from Blackmores is their scholarship funding program to the value of $330 000. The likely reason why this hasn’t been deleted is because these scholarships were reported on in the news, and once that happens it is always difficult to get rid of the information (and yes, scholarship funding is somewhat different than a fist full of cash to be spend on refining your techniques of how to hoodwink people). The same goes for the $500 000 received from the extremely controversial Jacka Foundation of Natural Therapies – this was also in the news and hence it is still listed. But this is also the reason why neither the NICM nor WSU published a press release proudly telling the world about one of the biggest ‘industry’ donations ever received by WSU – once it is in the news it is difficult to get rid of the information.

Clearly the NICM and WSU doesn’t want a public outcry similar to what happened after La Trobe university accepted millions of dollars from Swisse Wellness and more recently when the University of Sydney accepted money from Blackmores to establish a chair in complementary medicine. These two events did indeed cause a stir and there were even commentary and concerns coming from as far as the UK. No, this is not what WSU wants, so they simply delete this information and hope that no one would notice (they actually hoped that no one would notice that it was listed in the first place).

Apparently, they have learned from the mistakes made by other universities – or did they? If they did they would not have accepted this money, so no, the only thing that they have learned was to keep this information quiet – to fly under the radar, something that the other universities did not do. So, they decided not to be transparent and publicly defend their dubious decision, but at least they can now continue to mislead the public in peace and quiet without anyone noticing – or so they think (if any journalist reads this, please ask WSU what the hell they are doing – they are becoming an embarrassment for Australian science).

But the question remains – where did the money go? Maybe Blackmores decided to pull out? Unlikely, because the contract has been signed making it difficult to pull out without facing some sort of penalty. Did WSU and the NICM suddenly grew a conscience and decided to put science and the well-being of the public first? Well, a leopard never changes its spots so this is never going to happen. The NICM will never part with a single dollar, so the money is likely still there but they have just hidden it somewhere.

Maybe it is hidden under the name of a different researcher at the NICM? Unlikely, the more money you bring in as an individual researcher relates directly to the number of gold stars you get on your forehead from the Vice Chancellor – and Alan loves his gold stars. So, looking under the names of different NICM researchers did not yield any information, as expected. Maybe they moved it from ‘projects’ to ‘consultancy’? – nope, no luck there either.

Thankfully, there is a thing called screenshots. If it wasn’t for these screenshots, that you can find here and here, nobody would have known about this $5 million funding. Searching the WSU website using the project reference number (P00023564) gave one result where this project is described. The only problem is that there is no mention of the value of the project. The same goes for the $300 000 donations. All these projects are there but none include the monetary value of the projects. The millions of dollars from Blackmores therefore remains to be hidden out of sight and this is of course done intentionally – they simply do not want the public to know about this. Strange, isn’t it?

You have to ask yourself why this is. What are they so afraid of? Well, if you read the other articles on this blog site you will see what they are afraid of. They are intentionally misleading the public, causing harm and even death, for the sake of money and they want nobody to know about this. And hence they will gladly accept the money from Blackmores as long as nobody to knows about it. If the public finds out they might receive unwanted attention which might lead some people asking probing questions that neither the NICM nor WSU wants to answer.

So, what will be their next move? It does indeed look a bit suspicious when a university delete information, especially if its information regarding millions of dollars received from a controversial company. Will they now list these projects again after this article is published? Let’s see what happens.